I take greater offense to his characterization of conflicts - "We didn't do anything ... for three years, until sort of the blood lust was spent" - meaning, what, people just need to get some of that ethnic tension and killing out of their systems, and we should just let them? Then eventually, they'll suffer from "civil war" fatigue, after which a little light bombing will sort them right out? He repeats this same philosophy later, "before the process plays itself out and politics can assert itself." This seems bloody daft to me - ethnic conflict in Iraq didn't spring up out of a vacuum, and the US presence, and its decision to unilaterally support one proto-faction at the expense of the other, and even to encourage the former to lock the latter out of the process, certainly contributed GREATLY to the ethnic tension. So, how can we say that "fewer people have died"? There were points in the conflict when the Shia-Sunni tension was at a very low ebb. Withdrawing then might have done quite well to diffuse the conflict. But that wouldn't have done right by our own hubris, of course.

Bill, caught in a lie?

I love it when people act like the (first) Clinton presidency was some sort of glory days for progressive, humanitarian politics.  It's like speaking to an actual retard, only without the part where they have some sort of excuse.

I've been arguing for a while that, after the right wing has written off Iraq as a bunch of rag-head savages not worth the life of one of our Brave Boys, the liberals will ride to the rescue of the failing US occupation with their sob-sister "won't someone think of the children?" nonsense.

And that handover should occur sometime around, say, November of 2008.

What bugs me most about the mainstream discussion (and most center-left blog discussion, which of course doesn't mean this blog) of the Iraq War is the almost total lack of interest in the number of people our own military has killed, insurgent and civilian alike. It's notoriously hard to distinguish civilians from insurgents in a guerilla war (though partly because the counterinsurgency forces don't want to admit the insurgents they've killed were really civilians), so I'd settle for one lump sum.

Even a factor of two estimate. But nobody asks for this. So far as I can tell from the press, except for the scattered report here and there, our soldiers are suffering tens of thousands of dead and wounded (mostly the latter) and barely shooting back. Which is surely nonsense.

So then Bill can pretend that things will definitely get worse if US forces leave and maybe he's right, but you'd never suspect listening to him that maybe the arithmetic isn't that clear, since one major source of Iraqi casualties will be gone.

As for one of your earlier points, if he had any sense of decency he'd first acknowledge that the 300-400 thousand dead that he cites would mostly be alive if we hadn't invaded.

BTW, I did see a third or fourth hand estimate of 400,000 in the comment section of Juan Cole's blog some months back, in connection with LancetII. A student at one of those high-powered places where they teach you to be an imperialist (it might have been the Kennedy School or something along those lines, but I've forgotten which place) had a classmate very high up in Pentagon intelligence circles who supposedly told him that their estimate was 400,000, which would be at the low end of the Lancet CI. I'd guess that there are people in the US government who do try to estimate these things, accurately or not, and that Clinton or his wife can can get this information if he wants it. But more likely he's just talking off the top of his head.

What bugs me most about the mainstream discussion (and most center-left blog discussion, which of course doesn't mean this blog) of the Iraq War is the almost total lack of interest in the number of people our own military has killed, insurgent and civilian alike. It's notoriously hard to distinguish civilians from insurgents in a guerilla war (though partly because the counterinsurgency forces don't want to admit the insurgents they've killed were really civilians), so I'd settle for one lump sum.

Even a factor of two estimate. But nobody asks for this. So far as I can tell from the press, except for the scattered report here and there, our soldiers are suffering tens of thousands of dead and wounded (mostly the latter) and barely shooting back. Which is surely nonsense.

So then Bill can pretend that things will definitely get worse if US forces leave and maybe he's right, but you'd never suspect listening to him that maybe the arithmetic isn't that clear, since one major source of Iraqi casualties will be gone.

As for one of your earlier points, if he had any sense of decency he'd first acknowledge that the 300-400 thousand dead that he cites would mostly be alive if we hadn't invaded.

BTW, I did see a third or fourth hand estimate of 400,000 in the comment section of Juan Cole's blog some months back, in connection with LancetII. A student at one of those high-powered places where they teach you to be an imperialist (it might have been the Kennedy School or something along those lines, but I've forgotten which place) had a classmate very high up in Pentagon intelligence circles who supposedly told him that their estimate was 400,000, which would be at the low end of the Lancet CI. I'd guess that there are people in the US government who do try to estimate these things, accurately or not, and that Clinton or his wife can can get this information if he wants it. But more likely he's just talking off the top of his head.

What a monster. Assuming he's quoting some mortality study - which, given the available estimates, he almost certainly is - the hundreds of thousands are the number above the baseline "than would have died if the American military hadn't been there". Nevermind that if we'd just let sanctions fall said mortality rate would be on its way down, and nevermind how many millions might still be alive if Bill Clinton had dropped them when he presumably learned that the regime had effectively disarmed in the first place.

It amazes me that the war mongerers can claim what the death rate in Iraq might be if US forces are gone, while at the same time they cannot tell us what the death rate is with the US forces IN THE COUNTRY.

It defies logic.

And Bill Clinton's reasoning certainly defies logic. But at least he was a more subtle killer, as compared to 'SHOCK AND AWE' INC.

and as to "barely shooting back" position the US media tends to take - maybe they could explain why the US cannot produce enough bullets for Iraq domestically and have to buy from Israel?

I know something about Bosnia, and Clinton is WAY off base here. You are right, he is completely wrong.

Also, if the US had never invaded Iraq, I cannot see any way that over 100,000 Iraqis would be dead at this point.

What I don't understand is, why is Clinton covering for Bush and the neocons???

Clinton is preemptively covering for his wife.

Of the U.S.-led sanctions against Iraq estimated to have killed a half-million children, Madeleine Albright famously replied: “I think that is a very hard choice, but the price, we think, the price is worth it.”

Considering all the humanitarian goings-on that have occurred in Iraq since, Bill or Hillary Clinton would likely insist it was "not only worth it, but a damn fine investment."

But then there are those who argue that less people would have died in Bosnia without US involvement, because US officials encouraged the Bosniak leader Izetbegović to renege on the pre-war Lisbon agreement. Would that early partition plan have been possible without bloodshed comparable to the civil war that followed Izetbegović's decision? There's no way of knowing; but there was a peace plan and one party walked away from it on US advice.

"NATO bombed them for a few days" is a nice description of the three week Operation Deliberate Force, considering the concurrent Croatian attack on Krajina, the refugee crisis it produced, and all the tit-for-tat violence that flowed from that.

The party of might-makes-right (i.e. war mongers) don't really need to justify, (to quote gwbush "International law? Better call my lawyer"-see verbatim cartoon at- http://www.redstateupdate.net/full-page/fullpage-archive-36.html )

It is only folks who are conversant with concepts like morality that need to have their concerns about criminality mollified by constructs like those offered by Mr. Clinton-

I try to pay attention, and from what has been reported it seems that all of the following have agreed with gwbush's slogan (and I consciously refer to this as a slogan rather than a foreign policy position) with respect to Iran "all options are on the table" : Hillary Clinton-Barak Obama-John Edwards.

When I say "blessed are the peace makers" I am called juvenile or naive. When I say "an eye for an eye and soon the whole world is blind" I am mocked for appeasing 'terrorists'. When I say "war is over, if you want it" I am told that I am not a patriot. When I remember that all presidents since the 1950s have started wars and military actions, agreed to and ordered covert actions to destabilize, committed extra judicial executions and more "I tremble for my country when I consider that god is just".

peace is penance-

www.redstateupdate.net
funny, frightening, free
and 'it's all true'

If any of you can get a map of Europe from, say 1942, you will see that a lot of Eastern Europe was sliced up in a similar fashion to today's maps. Little ethnic principalities are no match against multinational corporations, especially with the aid of the U.S. military.

How's that oil law in Iraq going?

THE IRAQI OIL LAW---YOU CAN ROB some of the people all of the time.
YOU CAN ROB all of the people some of the time.
BUT YOU CAN'T ROB all the people all of the time.

How can Clinton say more Iraqis would have died if the US military hadn't been there? There was an ethnic civil war going on in Bosnia before NATO intervened; there wasn't one until after the US
invaded Iraq.

Sounds to me like ol Bill finally inhaled.

As saurabh implies, one gigantic and simply bizarre assumption in Clinton's logic is that the number killed in the Balkans represent some kind of exact representation of the number that have to die in any war before people get sick of killing and switch to political solutions. You can just apply the proportional number from Bosnia to any other country/situation and -- voila! -- that's the point at which people get sick of killing!

I'm too lazy, but someone could do a lot with this new theory that I'll call Clinton's Formula. e.g., what was the comparable number of Americans killed in the Civil War before Lee surrendered; does it mean that the British should have intervened -- maybe before Grant took command? How does the genocide in Rwanda compare to the death rate in the Balkans, and didn't it go on well past the end of their "blood lust"? Aren't we long past the time that the Israelis and Palestinians should have spent their "blood lust"? Did Clinton intervene too soon in Haiti -- before the Haitians had killed the "right number" of their own? Does this explain why the world refuses to intervene in any meaningful way in Darfur?

Indeed, using Clinton's Formula, one could decide, once and for all (and yes, tongue firmly in cheek, making fun of Clinton while not forgetting that we're talking about millions of horrible deaths): who are the "blood lustiest" people on Earth?

Clinton is a criminally overrated and irrelevant political figure and should act accordingly....

His wife is a living fool and an insufferable, elitist snob....

No one of any intelligence cares about what this horse's arse and/or mare's arse spit from their mouths!

For those with a masochistic curiosity, allow me to quickly discern and save you the suspense... They're scum, just like Bush&Co..

Damnit Posted, you FINALLY laid something out there I gotta agree with!!!

What an Ass! This guy was making policy in the former Yugoslavia based on Kaplan's "Balkan Ghosts," - a fine travelogue, but only that. And this jerk was making foreign policy based on a travelogue. What a lazy Ass!